Writing In The Margins

Investigates the art of reading by examining each aspect of reading, problems encountered, and tells how to combat them.

A collection of twenty-one essays by David Bartholomae, Writing on the Margins includes selections that have helped shape the discipline of composition studies. With a wide-ranging introduction and three retrospective postscripts to set the essays in context, it serves as a valuable reference and as a powerful introduction to crucial issues in the field. This book has been awarded the MLA's Mina P. Shaugnessy Award, recognizing an outstanding research publication on the teaching of English.

One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems—for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain—are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics. Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

Four "pitch-perfect" (Oprah Daily) essays by the author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter. In these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look into the origins of her literary prowess. She describes her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she warns against the perils of "bad language" and the ways in which it has long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others. An "incandescent...philosophical monograph on the nature of writing," (Molly Young, New York Times) this candid collection by one of the great novelists of our time is destined to delight general readers, writers, and Ferrante fans in equal measure. "Everyone should read everything with Elena Ferrante's name on it."--The Boston Globe

The Irish short story tradition occupies a unique space in world literature. Rooted in an ancient oral storytelling culture, the Irish short story has underwent numerous transitions, from 19th century Anglo-Irish writers such as William Carleton through to the 20th century's groundbreaking impact of George Moore's The Untilled Field. George Moore's work inspired the next generation of Irish Catholic writers such as Joyce, Frank O'Connor and Benedict Kiely, who foregrounded the backbone of the ...

In texts from the mid-Heian to the early Kamakura periods, certain figures appear to be "marginal" or removed from "centers" of power. But why do we see these figures in this way? This study first seeks to answer this question by examining the details of the marginalizing discourse found in these texts. Who is portraying whom as marginal? For what reason? Is the discourse consistent? The author next considers these texts in terms of the predilection of modern scholarship, both Japanese and Western, to label certain figures "marginal." She then poses the question: Is this predilection a helpful tool or does it inscribe modern biases and misconceptions onto these texts?

They say his clothes blend into the background, no matter where he stands. They say a lot of things about the Schwa, but one thing’s for sure: no one ever noticed him. Except me. My name is Antsy Bonano, and I was the one who realized the Schwa was “functionally invisible” and used him to make some big bucks. But I was also the one who caused him more grief than a friend should. So if you all just shut up and listen, I’ll tell you everything there is to know about the Schwa, from how he got his name, to what really happened with his mom. I’ll spill everything. Unless, of course, “the Schwa Effect” wipes him out of my brain before I’m done….